My name is Lynn and I'm a birdwatcher ...

It was the hobby that dared not speak its name, but having discovered a hotel in Trinidad where you can observe 170 species, including the British twitcher and its rare American cousin, the lister, Lynn Barber decides it's time to 'come out'

There, I've admitted it! I've always been scared of coming out as a birdwatcher because it is one of those tribes you don't necessarily want to belong to, especially when its chieftain seems to be Bill Oddie. But I do love watching birds and will travel long distances to do it. So when a friend told me that Trinidad has a famous birdwatching hotel called the Asa Wright Nature Centre, I was virtually on the next flight. Turning to my trusty copy of Birds of the West Indies by James Bond, I memorised its lovely names and counted the hours till I could see the violaceous euphonia, the blue-crowned motmot, the crested oropendola and the southern beardless tyrannulet.

The Asa Wright Nature Centre is even better than I had hoped. It is a huge old plantation house, built in 1906, high up in the north Trinidadian mountains and with a staggering view over the rainforest right down the Arima valley to the central plain. Asa Wright was a rich Icelandic woman who married an English solicitor and in 1946 went to live with him in Trinidad for the sake of his health. They had no children but were passionate about birds, so they bought a rundown coffee plantation, forbade shooting anywhere on their land and sought advice from scientists at the nearby New York Zoological Society field station on how best to preserve the fabulous biodiversity of the estate. Before Asa Wright died in 1971, she set up a charitable trust to maintain the estate as a nature centre, and stipulated that it should use income from guests to buy more land for conservation - it now owns more than 1,500 acres, having started with less than 200.

There are 170 species of bird on the estate, and 200 butterflies. You can see a good sample of them without ever moving from the verandah of the main house because it is hung around with sugar-water feeders for the humming-birds, who hover just inches from your face. Below the verandah, on the terrace, is a vast spread of birdtables to attract non-aerial feeders such as the motmots, tanagers and orioles, and below them on the ground is a comic chorus of agouti (big guinea pigs) and giant tegu lizards shuffling around to catch any food that falls from the tables. It is like a painting of the Garden of Eden: all these birds and animals seem quite untroubled by each other or by the humans gazing at them.

But, of course, if you are serious about birdwatching you also want to see some of the rarer species on the estate and there are brilliant guides to help you find them. Thanks to my guide, I was able to see the bearded bellbird, which you often hear in the forest because it makes an incredibly loud noise like a hammer striking an anvil, but which you rarely see. More entertaining, though, was the white-bearded manakin's lek. The lek is a display ground - just a patch of forest floor - where the male manakins, who look like fluffy black and white golfballs, spend the entire day practising their dance routines in the hope that a female will come along and choose them to mate. Their dance routines consist of hopping to and fro between two twigs, or bouncing up and down on the ground, or, best of all, sliding down twigs as if down a fireman's pole while uttering little squeaks of pleasure.

But Asa Wright's biggest claim to fame is that it has the only accessible colony of oilbirds in the world. These are nightjars that only come out at night, but there is a cave - actually a river gorge - on the estate where they roost and breed. A guide helps you down the precipitous path and then shines his flashlight up the rock walls and you suddenly see rows of red eyes staring at you and hear the most unholy racket of screeching and screaming, as if a hundred people are being strangled at once. They are called oilbirds because the chicks are so fat (at 70 days, they weigh 50 per cent more than the adults) that their bodies used to be used for lamp oil, or sometimes travellers would cut the heads off the chicks and then just light them and carry them round as torches. Most serious 'listers' go to Asa Wright for the oilbirds.

Listers are the American version of what we call twitchers - people who keep lists of all the species they have seen, often subdivided into birds they have seen in their own garden, in their own country, and elsewhere in the world. (I met someone in Norfolk once who kept a list of birds he had seen on television, not counting nature programmes, but flitting past in, say, Neighbours; apparently, the Falklands War was very good for skuas.) Birdwatchers like me are sniffy about listers - we watch birds, we tell them, we don't merely clock them. But Asa Wright was full of happy listers going 'That's a lifer!', meaning a bird they could add to their life list. Top lister while I was there was a Canadian called Nick Quickert, who claims to have seen more than 4,000 species, almost half the bird species in the world. But there is much dispute about what constitutes a sighting. Some people, Quickert says darkly, count birds they have heard but not seen, or seen only very fleetingly. His own rule is only to count birds he has 'had in the bins [binoculars]' long enough to identify all their salient features.

Bins and scopes (telescopes) are a big part of the lister's toybox - in fact, I suspect that some listers are keener on scopes than they are on birds. One American looking round the Asa Wright verandah said admiringly, 'There's a lot of expensive glass up here,' and added sotto voce to me: 'Let me tell you: size matters in this game'. The current hot name for listers is Swarovski, which I always thought made sparklers for Oscar winners but apparently also makes state-of-the-art bins and scopes.

You have to face it: birdwatchers are not a glamorous tribe. I was the babe at Asa Wright - the average age was, I would guess, well over 70 and there was one valiant lady on a Zimmer frame. But I liked being among American and Canadian birders, who strike me as more fun than the British version. British birders tend to disapprove of Asa Wright because, they complain, 'the birds are too tame', but really, I think, because they hate Americans. Most of them prefer to stay at Pax guesthouse, on Mount St Benedict, which - the manager proudly told me - is Bill Oddie's favourite hotel. I found it austere to the point of grim (my shower didn't work), and was not thrilled to find that it is next to a monastery and has the Stations of the Cross up the drive. I much preferred the comfort of Asa Wright, but if you are a birdwatcher with a strong dislike of Americans and complete indifference to hot water, then Pax guesthouse is the place for you.

British and American birdwatchers are almost two different species. The Brits tend to be slightly younger - Americans only take it up after retirement and seem to peak in their eighties - and everyone agrees that 'the Brits work harder for their birds'. They are prepared to trek up a mountain in the hope of seeing one rare species, whereas Americans prefer sitting with a G&T on the verandah at Asa Wright and watching 20 in an hour. Personally, I'm with the Americans on this one - I like birdwatching in comfort and have a strong aversion to trekking.

Hence my failure to see the Trinidad piping-guan, or pawi. This is an important bird because it is Trinidad's one claim to have an 'endemic' species (one that exists nowhere else in the world), although modern ornithologists tend to classify it as a subspecies of the blue-throated piping-guan, which is widespread in South America. (Since Trinidad is only about 10 miles off the coast of Venezuela, it would be strange if it did have an endemic species, unless it were a flightless bird.)

Anyway, I thought I'd better try to see the piping-guan, so went to stay at Grande Rivière on the north-east coast, which is where it is mainly found. Unfortunately, the local bird guide, Garvin Tinto, told me that it was a bad time of year for seeing guans because they were feeding high up the mountain and you can only see them for about an hour at dawn, when they come out to feed - after that they disappear into the forest. So we would have to trek up the mountain for, he reckoned, at least two hours in the dark to reach their feeding ground by dawn. Sadly, I had to say no. The maddening thing is that at other times of year, depending on what fruit is available, guans feed much lower down the mountain - sometimes you can even bump into them on the road at Grand Riviere. They are blue black turkey-like birds, not very exciting to look at, but Garvin the guide obligingly demonstrated their wing whirrs and call notes for me so that if a piping-guan ever comes my way I will recognise it. Still, I'm glad I went to the north-east coast because it is quite astonishingly beautiful, with sandy coves and rocky bays lined with seagrape trees, streams leaping down the mountains in a series of waterfalls then spreading out into wide lagoons between grassy banks before taking a final spin to the sea. Best of all, there are several beaches, including Grande Rivière, where you can see leatherback turtles laying their eggs (the season starts in late March). And all completely undeveloped - in fact so undeveloped that it is quite daunting.

The road along the coast is a potholed nightmare which is often blocked by mudslides and there is a 20-mile stretch in the middle where it peters out entirely and the east and west coasts are only linked by a hiking trail. There are very few hotels and most of them are more like youth hostels, but luckily there is one good one, Acajou, where I stayed, which consists of a dozen or so vaguely Japanese cabins overlooking the beach at Grande Rivière. It also has excellent food - but then Trinidadian food is altogether good, with a huge variety of fish and veg, and many excellent curries because of the large Indian population.

The best thing of all I saw in Trinidad was the scarlet ibis roost on the Caroni Swamp. At first this seemed a most unpromising expedition, puttering through the mangrove swamp in motorised punts along channels with names such as Number Nine Drain. The only bird I saw in the mangroves was the potoo (which looks like an owl but is actually a nightjar), whereas I was constantly worried by the sight of discarded snakeskins hanging from the branches overhead. Eventually you come out on to a huge lake dotted with wooded islands - a peaceful scene but again rather monotone, apart from the occasional heron. So when, out of the corner of your eye, you suddenly catch a flash of red, it seems to explode like a firework - and within minutes there are red flashes all around as skeins of scarlet ibis fly over the lake. At first they just flash past and disappear again but then they get bolder, and eventually one lands on a tree and within minutes the entire tree is red, covered top to bottom with ibises. It is an extraordinary red, too - much brighter than any fire engine - which continues to dazzle as dusk falls and the punts putter back into the gloaming. Apparently, there are about 12,000 scarlet ibis on the Caroni Swamp - sometimes, if your plane is coming into land at Port of Spain at sunset, you can see the red of them as you fly in.

I was only in Trinidad for a week, and mainly watching birds, so I can't claim to know the country, but what I saw of it struck me as charming, though oddly unequipped for tourists. It's as if the government made a decision to put all the tourists on the sister island, Tobago - which has plenty of good hotels - and keep Trinidad to themselves. That's fine by me - I've never been to Tobago, but I do know that it doesn't have oilbirds or a scarlet ibis colony or a hotel such as the Asa Wright centre, which must surely be the best place for birdwatching in the world.

If there is a better place, tell me and I'll go there; meanwhile, Trinidad remains my idea of birdwatching heaven.

Essentials

Lynn Barber travelled with Trips Worldwide (0117 311 4400; www.tripsworldwide.co.uk). A nine-night holiday to Trinidad costs from £1,385pp based on two people sharing and includes flights, three nights' full-board at Pax Guesthouse just outside Port of Spain, three nights' half-board at Acajou in Grande Rivière and three nights' full-board at Asa Wright Nature Centre. A wide range of tours are available from each hotel.